


Take the Weather From Your Heart

by ohmyohpioneer



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-26
Updated: 2015-01-26
Packaged: 2018-03-09 03:13:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3234173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohmyohpioneer/pseuds/ohmyohpioneer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>CS Neighbors AU. Emma finds herself in possession of a cabin in the wilderness of New England with only one neighbor: a certain Killian Jones.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Take the Weather From Your Heart

**Author's Note:**

> This is an ode to pioneer women, New England in the winter, and flannel. So much flannel.

Her phone lost reception about twenty miles back and the road went from pavement to gravel to dirt somewhere during that time and she’s in the goddamn middle of rolling, twisting  _nowhere_.

There’s a lingering stillness sitting heavy just above the day, grayness swallowing mountains and frost-burnt grass blanketing the ground in quiet.

It’s such a Granny thing to do: to up and die on her and leave her a stupid cabin of all things in a place that hasn’t seen civilization since before the French and Indian War and takes an orienteering degree to get to.

Just goddamn like her to teach her some murky, cryptic lesson from beyond the grave.

\---

The cabin isn’t much to behold – grayed logs and a sagging roof. Emma throws her car into first and kills the engine. She can see another building in the not too far distance–a pillowed curl of smoke sighing from its chimney–a thicket of trees that could be a forest, mountains.

More mountains. Wonderful.

The door gives an objecting moan when she shoulders it open and steps inside. It’s as cold in as it is out, and it smells like wood and wind and fire.

An old couch, covered in a sheet. Cast iron woodstove – the door ajar and she can only pray there’s no wildlife residing in the pipes. There’s a battered table shoved into a corner, it’s fold-out leaf hanging in exhaustion. An ancient looking four-burner range is her kitchen, and two doors standing closed next to one another.

The first she tries is a small bathroom, the next, a bedroom only slightly larger.

She can’t fucking wait to get out of this place.

\---

She is immediately aware of is how ungodly cold it is when she shakes herself awake in some twihour, with the moon invading the confines of the bedroom.

Her sweatshirt isn’t doing a damn thing to stave off the chill, and when she finally wills herself out of the bed with the whining springs and cavernous mattress, she realizes that the gaping mouth of the stove is empty. Not even a twig in sight.

And she’s pulling on her boots and spitting obscenities, as she makes a scramble for her coat and stumbles out the door.

The world is entirely quiet and she  _hates_  it. Just stupid trees and mountains and fricking freezing  _coldness_. Who even wants to live like this?

She rounds the corner to the giant space behind the cabin that is apparently a backyard in this part of hell, where she recalls seeing an axe earlier. It’s still there, fixed in a large stump like some lumberjack’s Excalibur and equally as stuck.

It’s minutes later when she’s yanked it free with a triumphant shout that she realizes that she may have a tool, but a source of wood is an entirely different matter; a matter that is, in fact, a problem.

Emma sets off across the overgrown field, crunching frost under each heavy tread, the cabin falling further behind. Her fingers are numb, and she pulls her hat tighter over her ears.

The eerie glow of whatever hour this is finally illuminates a fallen tree – probably only a few logs worth of fuel, but something to burn all the same. And, well, she’s never been an outdoorsy type, but the concept of hacking seems universal – and she’s decimated a toaster or two – so she swings the axe down and she feels triumph in the loud thump of metal meeting wood.

Triumph which quickly turns to frustration as repeated actions yield absolutely goddamn nothing.

And she must be making an unholy racket because she doesn’t even realize she’s been joined until a sleepcoarse voice addresses her, aggressive swing mid-arc.

“You know, you’re not going to get much done with that.”

He scares the shit out of her, but she’s not about to show weakness to the deranged person who is stalking her in the middle of the tundra at god knows what hour. She lets the blade connect with the log again, pretending it is her intention to desperately hack away small splinters.

“It’s fine,” she says – raise the axe and drops it again.

“If you say so, love,” his words are contained amusement, and she spares a glance over her shoulder.

His boots are untied and hanging open on his feet, pajama bottoms stuffed beneath the tongues; his Henley, she realizes, is inside out under an unzipped – and clearly hastily donned – duck jacket. Half asleep. He’s definitely still half asleep as he dazedly scratches his beard.

She thinks that if she keeps at this for another hour, she might eventually have two pieces to rub together.

“Listen, lass,” he raises his clipped accent over her efforts. “With a blade that dull and rusted, you’ll be at that until the Second Coming. I’m happy to give you enough wood to last you till morning, and then – when I am well and rested – I would be more than willing to lend you a nice, sharp axe.”

For a moment, standing out in the still-dark wild, she considers; takes in the lines at the corners of his eyes, and the way his hair is crazed and flat on one side.

“Thanks, but I’ve got this,” and she turns and makes a show of resuming her work.

“Suit yourself,” she can nearly hear him shrug as his retreating gait is slowly eaten by the rolling howls of low gusts against the ground.

\---

Emma returns to the cabin soon after the shadow of the man slips away with nothing but cold hands, rubbed raw, and an acute ache in her lower back.

She doesn’t take off her down coat or knit cap when she drops onto the bed and pulls the feather blanket up to her nose.

The wind pressing at her window groans lonelier than before.

\---

The other cabin is a short walk away – long enough that she regrets not pulling on gloves, but short enough that by the time she reaches the steps of the porch she still hasn’t decided if she’ll actually knock.

She takes in the aging, but well cared for clapboard dwelling, its cracked white paint and its precisely trimmed black shutters, its porch neat and worn, the rocker that sways under an invisible occupant.

There’s the fleeting thought that she is about to be murdered where no one will ever find her, but her VW won’t start in this chill, and it’s either horrific death by wood-dwelling psychopath or equally tragic demise as a human icicle.

She holds her breath and knocks.

When the door is pulled open a moment later, the grin he sends her almost has her turning heel.

“Ah,” he crosses his arms across his chest and leans on the doorframe. “The Lady of the Log herself. What can I do for you, m’lady?”

Emma tries not to pay attention to the way his mouth is twisted but his eyes are soft. She looks down at her feet and notes that the gray paint on the porch could do with a touchup, and shoves her hands into her back pockets.

When she meets his eyes again, it feels like there is a memory she’s misplaced, but doesn’t know what or where, so she clears her throat and focuses her attention just over his shoulder.

“I was hoping I could take you up on that offer?”

And when the corners of his mouth stretch further, she plows on, “The axe?”

He nods, disappears for a moment, and she doesn’t look inside, tries not to notice the boots lined neatly along the wall, or the garish, handknit quilt folded and thrown over the arm of a plaid sofa.

“I’m happy to help you out, love,” he tells her, axe in hand.

Snatching it from his grasp, she gives a firm shake of her head. “Really. Don’t need your help.”

Her fingers are white around the handle, and she takes care to place one foot in front of the other as she makes toward the trees in the distance.

\---

Killian.

His name is Killian, he tells her as he jumpstarts her car.

And when he takes her name and repeats it with inclined head and gentle syllables she’s not sure she’s ever really heard it before.

\---

She’s used to the mountains now. To the way they take up so much of the sky she sometimes has to blink to tell snow from cloud, to the way they crest and trough like Boston Harbor before a storm, to the way she feels more free and less trapped.

Emma is not, however, used to  _life_  in the mountains. To the way the wind blows so harshly she sometimes has trouble lighting her stove, to the way the gas pilot sometimes goes out unexpectedly, to the way bears seem to feel free to wander across her yard.

The second time she knocks on his door she spends more time weighing her options, rising on her toes, sinking in thought.

“Swan!” the sleeves of his flannel are rolled up, tattoos giving under sinew as he wipes grease from his hands. “What fortunate winds have brought you to my doorstep?”

“I don’t want to interrupt,” she signals to the towel, pivots.

“Hold on, now. I’ve got all the time in the world,” he’s hooked his thumbs in the loops of his belt. “I would love nothing more than to help a lady in need of a hand.”

She snorts, but offers, “My water? Isn’t working?”

And he’s nodding, handing her a cup of coffee - milk, no sugar, coiling rings of steam in the frigid morning - and they’re down his stairs to her cabin, tool box clanking a metallic chorus against his thigh, laugh cradled in the broken quietude.

“What you have here, Swan,” they’re in the narrow closet off the back of the cabin she hadn’t bothered with until this point; he’s looking up at her from his seat on the floor, and she has her fingers curled around a mug that reads  _Captain,_ “Is a burst pipe.”

Killian points and she buries her face in the warmth of the coffee, tries not to notice whatever mountains are cresting in her chest, and says, “Huh?”

“See that there?” He carefully traces his finger so she can follow its path. “The insulation’s rotted right through, left the pump pipe exposed. Water freezes, expands. Pipe goes boom.”

“Boom?” She’s not smiling.

“Boom.” He definitely is.

And they spend the afternoon leg against leg, his hand guiding hers with an adjustable wrench as they replace a pipe. It’s all solitude and togetherness and she feels  _useful_  and -

“Well done, Swan.”

His dimples are nearly devastating, the way he looks at her like he see her.

“Yeah?” It’s heavy, that look. Her fingers tangle around one another.

He exhales. “Yeah.”

\---

His porch becomes this strange, liminal space - a beat between words, a hitch at the end of an inhale - and when she looks at the faded red door she’s never sure if she should be coming or going, just that she’s there and unable to step in either direction.

Just wood and curling paint and inertia.

\---

“So what’s the plan, then?” he asks as they lug aluminum buckets from the sugar maples around his property to his shed.

“For today?” she grunts under the weight of the two containers. “Going to try to fix that goddamn pilot - keeps going out.”

“I can help with that, if you’d like - had that problem last year,” he stops to lift the lid of a bucket hanging from another tree, shakes his head, and continues his path. “But no - for the Widow Lucas’s cabin?”

“Oh,” she sets her cargo down to gather her breath, holds her hand up against the sun to meet his curious gaze. “I’m going to try to fix it up as best I can, maybe get that roof replaced, then sell it. Not like I couldn’t use the cash.”

“Right,” he bites at his lip, “Of course.”

They continue in silence. At the shed, he pulls out what appears to be an outdoor stove of some sort - maybe something meant to heat a deep fryer - with a vat on it. He empties the content of his buckets into it and motions for her to do the same.

“So what do we do now?” she asks because whatever companionable air they existed in before is thicker.

“Now,” he lights the burner and stands back. “Now we wait for the water to boil off that sap - leaving us with-”

“Syrup?” she guesses.

“The nectar of the gods,” he confirms, lopsided and teasing.

“Nice.” It’s cold outside and she has plenty to take care of, and he hasn’t moved from his stance taking her in. “Well, I’d better go. That pilot won’t wait forever.”

“Aye,” and she moves to leave but his voices catches her. “Do me a favor, Swan?”

She turns, “What’s that?”

He scratches behind his ear, “Make sure I like my new neighbors, yeah?”

Even she knows her smile is thin. “Sure. I’ll see what I can do.”

\---

Not for the first time, she curses - loudly and obscenely - at the distance from her to the closest store. How does anyone even put up with this? Has there never in the history of this godforsaken place been a midnight Ben and Jerry’s run?

She’d finally decided to tackle the mess that is the supply closet only to discover that, of course, the million-year-old lightbulb has lived its last moments and she really hadn’t factored a two hour trip to buy a singular lightbulb into her plans for the day.

Also not for the first time she says a quick prayer of thanks for the proximity of her very British community of one.

“Killian!” She shouts as she approaches his house, pausing for an exaggerated second before clambering loudly to the entrance. She knocks - no answer.

She knocks again. He’s always here.

She cranes her neck and, yes, there’s his pick-up, sitting attentively in the drive.

“Killian!” She tries again.

Her hand hovers over the knob, before clasping tightly, and turning. His house is still, covered in books and model ships and sailing rope and scattered tools lying abandoned.

She walks to his kitchen where she’s sat on several occasions, taking pulls at steaming coffee while he talks and she offers laconic responses - her very un-morning person attitude a constant source of his glee.

“Killian,” another try as she bends down to open the cabinet beneath the farmhouse sink, “I’m just taking a lightbulb! I’ll owe you one next time I head into town!”

When she stands up she nearly drops the delicate orb, Killian leaning elbows first on the counter. “What the hell?!”

He giggles.  _Giggles._  “Oh no, make yourself at home, Swan. Please. The silver is right this way.”

Emma’s never rolled her eyes so hard in her life, and her heart is thrumming wildly when she grabs a dishtowel and throws it in his stupid, handsome face.

\---

“Jesus Christ, Killian,” she hasn’t even turned on the lights, but the haze of stars behind him casts a silver glow and she can just  _hear_  the goddamn grin. “I thought  _you_  were the one lecturing me about neighborly etiquette. Do you even know what time it is?”

But he just pushes past her, and makes a grab at her boots. “Come on, Swan. No time to waste.”

He’s got her sitting on the bench beside her door, and he’s sunk to his knees, pulling on her left boot, tying it swiftly, tightly, and then repeating the motion with her right foot. She’s not even surprised at this point, and honestly, her brain hasn’t caught up with her body, so she sits numbly while he makes a show of searching her shelf, “Mittens? Cap?”

“Can’t this wait till morning?” She grunts when he pushes a hat over the mass of bedhead she knows she has.

He shakes his head, “No, it cannot.”

Her legs finally obey her and she stands - albeit lethargically - and then he’s dragging her across the field, excited trips and tugs over the crunching snow, and her winter lungs burn in the air.

“Not long now,” he’s turning back and laughing; it’s like a dream with the white and the indigo, his hand around hers and the hurried line they cut toward the line of pines.

It’s further than she’s been before - the concentric circles she mentally draws around her cabin and his have been expanding and expanding, but now they’re snapping fallen branches and brushing past the twisting arms of tamaracks.

“Killian,” she’s trying to take in the ceiling of the woods, trying to  _breathe,_  “Shit. Killian, are you taking me out here to murder me?”

“Could’ve killed you back at your cabin!” he supplies. Lovely.

And suddenly, there are no trees, and Killian’s dropped his grip in favor of sprinting toward the breaks of blue. And then he’s  _sliding_.

“Swan!” He’s seriously gone crazy, letting out a hearty laugh she’s never heard from, well, anyone, and particularly her reclusive neighbor. “Swan, it’s  _beautiful_!”

Where she’d expected a clearing, there’s a pond - glassy and solid, with evergreens bowing at the edges - a pond that Killian is now gliding recklessly over.

“Killian!” Her feet are stuck at the rocky shoreline, “You’re going to kill yourself!”

But her shouts return to her, and Killian continues pushing his feet along the silverwhite surface in an approximation of skating. When his boots fly out from under him and he makes an  _umph_ of impact, she sighs and braces herself for the frictionless surface.

She’s never ice skated before, she realizes. It was never an opportunity afforded to her, and she’d never seen much of point in it when she was old enough to be on her own.

When she reaches Killian, he’s flung supine all arms and legs and assholishly charming grin. “Swan, you’ve come to save me!”

And before she can register his movement, he’s pulled her down next to him.

The pond is radiating cool under her back; it’s a peaceful sort of chill, like she’s being held closely to something that is alive. There’s the coldcracking of settling ice, and the whole world feels like it’s holding its breath; cottoned silence and calm. He’s quiet, but she can see his eyes moving over the dark and the pinprick stars that reflect in them.

“I had no idea this was back here,” she finally murmurs.

His eyes flick to hers for a moment, she can feel his gaze as warm as the ice is cold, then return to the milky clusters crowding above.

“It’s an ideal place for contemplation,” he offers. "Closest I can get to water, anyway."

And what stretches out between them then makes her safe as though they’re wrapped in the protection of the forest and the water and the night sky.

"Do you ever get lonely out here?"

The suspended air groans and creaks, rustles at needles, bends at his hummed sigh. "After my brother died, there was...so much  _loss_ , so much nothingness in my life, in all that I had before.” They’re both still looking up, sprawled side by side. “I felt lonelier there - with everything I  _knew_  and  _had_  but suddenly didn't  _want_  or  _feel_  anything for anymore - than I ever have here."

“Did you ever find it again?” Emma traces along the outline the treetops cut, connects the dots to form imaginary constellations. “Meaning?”

If the word is jagged in her throat, he doesn’t make any comment.

“I thought I had,” a pause. "Though lately I think I might have been fooling myself."

His words hang heavy, and she doesn’t know if she should grab them or let them fall, until she sits up quickly, and rubs her gloves together, “Well, I’ll have to be sure to put this on the listing.” She stands on shaky sea legs. “Seems like it’d be a good selling point.” 

“Right,” he doesn’t move for a beat. “Definitely.”

\---

Her fire is barely gasping with life, and she’s never seen anything quite as formidable and astonishing as the snow currently drowning out the ground.

It’s not that she’s afraid, it’s just that there’s a muted comfort to it all that has ignited a strange pang of loneliness that seems to increase with each inch collecting in the corners of her windows.

It only takes her a minute of shuffling and blind reaching to find a bottle of alcohol left behind by Granny in the mysterious cabinet above the fridge, and she throws on a pair of hiking boots and zips the handle of booze under her coat.

\---

The trek to Killian’s cabin - which she refuses to acknowledge she has, by now, completed more times than she can enumerate - is somehow miles long, and she thinks she’s making more ground sideways than in a straight line. But she can she the glowing beacon of his house even in this whiteout, so she pushes forward.

And for the first time since she’s stood on his porch, she moves without hesitation, up the steps, across the snow sodden wood, and she’s thrust open his door in a flurry of weather and cold and rosy-cheeked excitement.

He’s on his couch, jeans and socks and nose-deep in a derelict paperback, which is immediately cast aside when she blows in.

“You should lock your door,” she curls her numb fingers around the cuffs of her coat, “Never know who could just let themselves in.”

His hands come up, brushing at her shoulders. “Too right,” his thumbs make a synchronized effort to skim errant flakes from her cheeks.

She’s frozen through, but everything about this moment is  _warm_  his home, his hands, and she swallows. “I come bearing,” her limbs finally move, and he steps back as she unzips her parka, “provisions.”

“Provisions?” he eyes the nearly full bottle of rum under a raised eyebrow.

Emma shrugs, “Didn’t want you to get cold.”

There’s that laugh again, the one that fills every corner of the room. “Well, lass, you appear to be soaked to the bone. Let’s get you something dry to slip into - then we can ensure that your victuals do not go unappreciated.”

“For self preservation,” she lets him pull off her coat.

“For self preservation,” he agrees.

\--- 

When she emerges from his bedroom - modest, neat, stacked with books, unsettlingly like home - she’s exchanged her snow-soaked jeans for a pair of flannel pajamas that she identifies as the pair she first saw him in that night in the field with her axe and stubborn words, and wool hiking socks that reach her knees.

"The finest China for my guests," Killian makes a sweeping motion over the dinged enamel camping mugs that he just finished pouring a healthy dram into.

She crosses her arms, “Finest?”

His head dips and he offers a shy smile, “Cleanest.”

They settle in front of the fire, sitting deep in the cushions of his couch with their ankles balanced on the grate of his fireplace - a gorgeous thing crafted from granite he tells her he laid himself.

“Cheers,” she toasts and clacks her mug against his.

\---

He makes her laugh.

The rum is rising in her cheeks, buzzing and she is  _laughing_  and  _happy_  and this isn’t what she expected at all. This isn’t the lesson she’d thought she’d stumble onto when she’d begrudgingly packed up her car and driven into nothing and nowhere.

She’s struck because she’d driven to  _him._

\---

Somewhere at a time that is impossible to name, when the howling of the storm has reached deafening levels, when her head is lolling easily at the hollow where his neck and shoulder meet, she looks at Killian and  _sees_ him.

Sees the way he is alone, sees the way the corners of his eyes are crowed but tired. Sees the way the mountains and the trees have grown over the sea, have hardened him. Sees the scar on his cheek, sees how deep it runs.

And she tilts her head and she kisses him.

“ _Emma,_ ” and she hears him now. Hears the way he exhales her name - all those inhales at his door, on his porch, letting go.

His mouth is still moving against hers when she lifts up, resting her legs on either side of his thighs. She presses into him, her feet slipping in the oversized hiking socks she doesn’t want to take off, the calloused pads of his fingers glancing over flannel and beneath the hem of her sweater.

She catches his lip and nips gently, thinks about how he takes it between his own teeth when he’s unsure, and she’s so sure of this. His hands are splayed across her back, and with another careful clatter of teeth, she pulls the cashmere free.

Killian’s face is redorange in the ember glow, and she runs a hand down the shadows that are cast there. She shivers, and his eyes don’t leave hers when he reaches for the quilt folded over the sofa arm and throws it over her shoulders.

He pulls at the material hanging on either side of her, bringing her her forward, her lips lightly to his again. “Is this part of your active rewarming process, Swan?” The press of his forehead into hers - sheltered beneath the blanket - is like a secret.

“No,” she burnishes the corner of his mouth with a soft kiss. “This is a thank you for that axe.”

“Ah,” he breathes, “better late than never, I suppose.”

“Mmm,” Emma considers with her nose to his. “It is.”

\---

It’s like swimming in color, the lazy way the firelight filters through the blanket; a warm stained glass of comfort and slow movement.

His hair is stuck in strange angles from the static of the quilt, and she takes it under finger again as he sustains his weight on his forearms. Emma’s blood is languid as she comes down and it’s a lovely delirium to find herself in; him cradled in her thighs with the scratch of couch against her skin.

“This-” she lets out drawn breath as he mouths at the dewy hollow of her throat.

“What was that, Swan?” he sends grumbling vibrations across her breastbone.

And it’s so, well,  _good_  she’s afraid to splinter this moment.

“Nothing,” his back muscles tense as he pulls away, “It’s nothing.”

“Nope,” he pops in that stupid boyish way, and rolls to his side so their legs are twined.  “None of that now.”

“It's stupid,” even his beard is gilded gold in this little cocoon of quilt; she scratches her fingernails along it’s path from chin to ear. “It’s...it’s just that I've felt lonely my whole life.”

Intent eyes tell her to continue.

“Like,” she sighs, struggles for the words as his thumb sweeps up and down her side, “like even if I had someone, they weren't ever really  _there_? Or I was never  _present_? Like I was this-this shadow or echo or something - always a second too late for my own life or not quite real, you know?”

Swallowing tightly, she feels the humidity of his exhales, and... _is._

“But, God,” her hands surround his face, “this is the middle of fucking  _nowhere_  and I feel like I'm  _here_. Like my heart and self and body are finally in one place and I'm not...lonely."

“You make me not lonely.” And when she kisses him again, it’s with all of her.

\---

She was always a fan of sunsets; how the day died in a hazy fan of blue and red and pink and purple.

But as she sits cross-legged in the wooden rocker on his porch, hands pulling in heat from the coffee mug in her grip, quilt tucked around her, she thinks she might like sunrises more.

She’d never noticed that - that his porch faced east. There’s fog haloing the snow, and at the peak of the mountain, light is just beginning to nimbus, reaching out and out and out.

“You’re up early,” his voice is so like it was that first night; laden with sleep, but now throaty with pleasure.

“Thought I’d finally give this morning thing a  try,” she smiles when he smooths his hand over the crown of her head and drops a kiss there.

He sighs contentedly and squints against the burning light.

“Have you ever replaced a roof?”

Killian's brow furrows, but he answers her question with the same candor as ever. "I have - years ago. Why do you ask?"

She sips innocently, but lets her smile break over the horizon of the rim. "I really don't think I'll survive another winter with that monstrosity. Wouldn’t want to freeze to death.”

And his mouth is the sunrise, too. 

“No,” he looks down, back up at her. “No, we wouldn’t want that.”


End file.
